


Missing

by Ika (Dolores_Crane)



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-23
Updated: 2010-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-14 00:02:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 17,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/143139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dolores_Crane/pseuds/Ika
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An AU where Gauda Prime went differently. The Scorpio crew are having difficulty fitting in with Blake's new team, and something terrible has happened to Jenna.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

_The master's tools will never demolish the master's house._  
\- Audre Lorde

PROLOGUE

Avon pushed Orac's key down softly, started to speak, stopped, closed his eyes, and stood for a moment, his fingers carefully spread around the sharp corners of the casing. It was half possessive, half as if he needed support to keep him from falling.

"Orac," he said gently. "Why have you included item 7.1 in your latest update to my secure data store?"

+I should have thought the answer was obvious.+

"I have not the slightest interest in the activities of bounty hunters several sectors away from me. If I were intending to visit this Gauda Prime, then perhaps the information would be relevant. As it is - "

+Kindly study the item in full before wasting my time with complaints. You yourself designed the monitoring and filtering program under which this information was to be brought to your attention.+

"That program was installed so that I should be notified immediately of any major plans or actions on the part of the Federation."

+Or any other significant political movements, both those based on planets within this sector and those likely to have effects over a number of different worlds. Yes.+

"Bounty hunting is not a significant political movement."

+The data suggests that this is merely a cover. Blake is unlikely to - +

"Blake is dead," said Avon.

+You have no logical grounds for thinking that Blake is dead. This information confirms that he is not.+

"Blake is dead, Orac," said Avon and pulled out the key. He stood for a moment looking at the key in his hand, as if he wasn't sure what it was, then pocketed it, sat down and returned to studying his desktop terminal. Item 8 of the daily update: a message from someone claiming to be Egrorian. The voice print matched, for what that was worth.

"Why not?" he said.

*********************

Avon sealed the box of things he was taking from the base, and looked around his quarters for a moment before settling Orac's key into place.

"All right, Orac. Relay information about the co-ordinates of Gauda Prime to the Slave computer and collate all information on the current whereabouts and activities of... Blake... in a new segment of my secure data store."

+Very well. Although this task could have been completed more conveniently several weeks ago at the time the information was obtained, if you had not persisted in your absurd and illogical conviction that Blake was dead.+

"Dead or not, it seems that he is our last hope," said Avon. He pushed the wall communicator. "Tarrant? Are all the charges set?"

"Set and ready. We're waiting to board _Scorpio_."


	2. Part One

PART ONE

ONE

Blake was standing behind Klyn, looking at the screen over her shoulder, and drinking soup. She wished he wouldn't. This need he had to be everywhere at once, to know everything as soon as it happened... it was obsessive. It was as though there was only ever Blake, not a growing army-in-training of around, what, forty people now on the Gauda base alone. And then Deva always hovering behind him; the one whose job it was to know what it was Blake had to know. And now this little fledgling, Arlen: another one to train up. Klyn sighed.

"What's that?" Blake said, pointing, just as she noticed the reading.

"Looks like another flyer's just come in. That's strange... it's not one of ours, but the computer let it land. Must have our signals. What do you want to do about it?"

"Put out a general warning. Have whoever's on board escorted in here."

"Do you think it's anything to do with that ship that landed over in Plantation Five? The planet-hopper?"

"I doubt it."

"Still, it's strange. There's been a lot of activity today. Something's going on."

"Well, perhaps we're about to find out what it is," said Blake mildly. He propped himself on the console, facing the door they would come through, his hand not too far from his gun.

"Never a dull moment," said Deva gloomily.

*

He came through the door. Alone/with three armed soldiers. Avon.

Blake made a small sound, "Oh." Then he said, "Avon."

*

Deva was watching Blake's face like a screen: everything that mattered was happening there, slowly, painfully; painfully for Deva.

*

Blake had woken up in the morning and shot two people, trapped and cooked a piglet, brought in a possible new recruit, drunk some soup, and then the door opened and Avon walked impossibly in. "Oh," he said. Then he said, "Avon."

"Yes," said Avon.

It seemed to Blake that there was nothing else that needed to be said then; but he was dimly aware that there were five other people in the room, and that they might not all be watching time stopping, undoing itself, and rearranging everything across the uncrossable distance between himself and Avon. Something else needed to be said, then.

"Well," he said, "you certainly took your time finding me."

Avon started laughing, one hand going to his mouth, the other brushing against the empty holster at his waist and then hanging by his side, still.

"Avon? Avon, are you all right?"

He stopped laughing. "Perfectly. I - Could you ask your friends to stop pointing their guns at me? Unless, that is, you are intending to sell me."

"Lower your weapons," said Blake.

"Thank you. That's a little more restful. Now, supposing you tell me what you have been doing for the past four years." The last two words were not emphasised, but marked somehow by the effort it took not to emphasise them.

"Why, Avon, I was waiting for you, of course." He meant it as a joke but when he heard it, it struck him as entirely serious. And suddenly he was moving towards Avon; and as soon as he moved Arlen was on him, with her gun at his head.

"Everybody stand quite still," she said in her quick, carrying voice, as the alarm started to go off and the emergency lighting cut in: red. Danger. "You said you couldn't tell any more who was Federation and who wasn't, Blake; you were right."

"Yes," said Blake, disengaging her casually, "but I wasn't about to make a mistake like giving a new recruit a loaded weapon within three hours of her arrival. You might as well drop it, Arlen."

She shrugged, tried shooting, dropped the gun when it didn't respond. "The base is surrounded anyway. You don't stand a chance. You might as well surrender now."

Blake picked up the gun and threw it over to Avon. He didn't see Avon's face until the gun was in the air: he was snarling and frozen and somehow entirely terrifying. It must have been by reflex that he caught the weapon, and then he stood quite still, holding it. He looked like a still photograph.

"Get him to the armoury, Deva. That gun takes the blue clips."

And as he spoke the film started moving again: a war film. Shooting. Shouting. Chaos.

Blake got separated from Avon quite early on and that fixed image floated at the back of his head, behind the gunshots and the fast-moving flicker of bodies to shoot and bodies to protect that floated in front of him. It was like the days after the explosion that had nearly cost him his eye, when he still noticed the drag of the lid over his vision: before he'd learnt to compensate for what he'd lost.

Movement at the end of the corridor. Blake raised his gun and aimed it at the movement. At a tall boy, curly hair, so clean and neat it didn't seem to matter that he was out of uniform - children, the Federation were using children; protect them from perverts but send them out to kill - and though he'd seen it a thousand times he was still angry, he was angry again. He tightened his finger, thinking over and over again: killing the child is killing the men who send the children out.

"Wait," said the boy quickly, raising his hands so that his gun - not Federation issue - pointed to the ceiling. "I'm a friend. My name is Del Tarrant."

"Tarrant. From the _Scorpio_."

"Yes. Avon contacted us." He smiled, flashy and giving nothing away. "We seem to have come at rather a bad time."

"How did you get in?"

"We had to shoot our way through rather a lot of troopers," said a girl's voice from round the corner. She stepped out beside Tarrant, holding herself tall and proud although one arm was dangling crazily at her side and Blake thought he could see bone coming through the fabric of her sleeve. "There aren't many left, I'm afraid."

"Thank you... Soolin?"

"Dayna. Soolin and Vila are at the other side of the base. They're meeting Avon there."

Blake nodded, lowered his gun, and felt suddenly exhausted.

Deva's voice, over the intercom: "Main attack has been repelled. Code alpha-seven. Code alpha-seven. Main attack has been repelled."

Alpha-seven designated one of the larger training rooms. "Come on," said Blake, "I'll show you the way."

"Thank you. Who are you, by the way?"

"Blake," said Blake and watched the shock on their faces. He turned away from it and started the walk to the regrouping room, weary in every part of himself.

TWO

"Blake! And Deva!" said Fenn joyfully, then muted himself slightly. "It's good to see you both." He was half-running to meet them across the landing bay; his footsteps and Pree's, a few yards behind him, echoed in the high, wide space. When he reached them he hugged them both largely, placing small kisses on each cheek. The smell of him was a small, clean shock to both of them.

"You must be exhausted," he said, looking at them. "Who've you got with you? Hello, Veron. Oh, and I don't know you, do I? You weren't joking when you said you were expanding, Deva. I don't know how we're going to find room for you all. Looks like Blake's going to have to double up with someone. Toss you for him?" He winked.

"This is Hask," said Deva, who wasn't offended, just really tired. "Hask, Fenn."

"Hello, Hask. Right. Any of you injured?"

"Just Hask," said Blake. "We've patched him up but he could do with a couple of days in your medical unit. Most of the bad casualties aren't moving any further than Gavisus-Tri."

"Amben's base? All right," said Fenn. "Pree, get this one over to Lorida in medical. See you later, Hask. Now, Blake, what do the rest of you want to do? Straight to bed, or a drink first?"

 _Straight to bed_ , thought Deva.

"Has the _Scorpio_ got in?" said Blake.

"Hours ago," said Fenn. "That ship's faster than it should be. Dayna and Vila are in medical, the rest are in the common room having an eye kept on them."

"Drink first, then," said Blake.

Veron went to bed. Deva didn't.

THREE

And there he was, looking as incongruous in Fenn's common room as a manipulated photograph. He was sitting, scowling, on the three-sides-of-a-square couch, clutching a glass, silent. The two from the Scorpio were sitting next to each other on another side of the couch, Tarrant holding an empty glass, Soolin sipping, talking quietly to Tyce Sarkoff who was perched up above them on the corner of the couch, her feet on the seat. She stood up when she saw Blake and the others come in and nodded to them gravely.

"Hello, Blake. Hello, Deva. I'm glad you got here safely. Do you want a drink?"

"Cup of tea," said Deva, trying not to look at Avon.

Tyce smiled. "That I could have guessed. Blake?"

"Chocolate, please. And you could put some whisky in it, if you've got any."

"I could have guessed that too," said Tyce, and went over to the machine on the wall.

*

Hot tea - good tea, better than the Gauda base could usually get - and sitting down somewhere safe that wasn't travelling faster than light. And Blake still whole and safe beside him, the warmth from his body answering the warmth and peace in Deva, which was only disrupted by the violence with which he wanted Avon not to be sitting on the other side of Blake.

"..." said Tyce.

"What? Sorry, Tyce, I wasn't listening."

"I said, we've heard from the Gav-Tri ship and the Tyria ship so far. They've got through fine. It looks like you've organized a very successful major evacuation."

"Thank you," said Deva. "It feels like all my life I've been waiting to hear those words." ( _Why, Avon, I was_...) The violent, alert part of him was listening to the conversation on the other side of the couch: light voices, Tarrant, Soolin; dark-deep voice, Blake; all quietly embellishing the edges of a central silence.

Tyce laughed. "How's the tea?"

"It's very good. Where did you get it?"

"Don't tell Fenn, but from Earth. Via Space City. A friend of a friend of a friend..."

" - of a friend of Jenna's?"

"Of course. How is Jenna? And the other LZs?"

"Still out of contact," said Deva. "It's a risky location. We're not expecting to hear from them for another month or so."

Tyce wrinkled her nose. "I hate that. Is it just you and Blake here from Gauda? Who else is with you?"

"Veron - "

"Brilliant. I could do with talking to her about some things."

"- and a new man, Hask."

"Nine of you, then."

 _Four_ , Deva was about to say, then he realized what she meant. "Nine extra bodies, Tyce, yes. Sorry."

"Ah, well. Nine extra bodies is nine extra people to send on supply runs."

Movement on Deva's other side. He looked round to see Avon standing up. It looked somehow like a complicated manoeuvre.

"I'd like to get some rest," said Avon. "Good night."

"You remember how to get to your quarters?"

"Yes. Thank you." He walked out of the room without a backward glance.

*

Blake and Deva went to bed soon afterwards.

FOUR

"The Federation has still not recovered from their losses in the Andromedan War. At least not sufficiently to indulge in widespread conventional conquest. Hence: drug control. Pylene-50."

The word could still send a charge across the room. Eight people suddenly breathing a little faster, tensing their muscles slightly. Deva was oversensitive to that kind of thing today, as if he expected the air between Avon and Blake to crackle. He thought he'd felt Blake tense a little beside him as they walked in; he wasn't sure.

Avon, orating at the head of the table. Deva looked at him as dispassionately as he could. Average height. Good bones under skin beginning to slacken a little at the jaw. Shoulders set at an angle against the world. Heavy leather jacket. Terrible, terrible hair: a balding man without a hairdryer. Eyes deepset and bruisy with tiredness. Mechanical passion in his voice: the speech was obviously rehearsed.

Pree and Tyce sitting neatly and quietly beside Fenn: the effect was strange. The people on Fenn's base ran to coloured, dreadlocked or spiked hair, piercings and tattoos anywhere that showed and several places that didn't, whilst the Scorpio crew - drab clothes, Alpha hair - could almost have walked straight out of the Domes; but Pree and Tyce, dreadlocked and pierced, sat neat and quiet, standing out as the only people in the room who hadn't been through a raid and a major evacuation recently.

The _Scorpio_ crew on the other side of the table: Soolin and Tarrant trying to keep their faces clear and intelligent through the bruises and the tiredness, Dayna looking at a fingernail on the hand in the cast. Hask sitting by them. And Blake beside Deva.

"Originally the stuff was administered by medical laser, but now it is being introduced into reservoirs or even into the air. The problem seems overwhelming."

"We know," said Fenn politely. "Lubus. Porthia Major. Helotrix. The Rephlar system. The Lindor system."

Small nods and small sighs. Tyce's face tensing: it was only six months since Lindor had gone.

"Ah," said Avon, and smiled. "But we have the antitoxin."

Blake leant forward across the table. Deva could feel him beginning to fill the room up.

"Yes, we heard you had the antitoxin. I'd be interested to know what you have been doing with it?"

Avon aimed the smile just past Blake's ear. "We have the antitoxin. What we don't have is the ability to manufacture it on a large scale. We have been attempting to form an alliance with the systems around Betafarl - Serrus, Hirrial, and Cyntha - in order to do so."

"Betafarl? Have they got that far?" asked Fenn, and Blake said "What went wrong?"

"We were betrayed," said Avon, giving Tarrant an indecipherable look, and the room tightened again at the word. "That is why we have had to evacuate our own base. We have the beginnings of an alliance in Sector Eight, and we have the formula for a pylene-50 antitoxin. We need to unify and expand that alliance, and we need the resources to manufacture and distribute the antitoxin."

"Are you sure they've got as far as Betafarl?" Fenn asked again.

"Not yet, I think. But they are penetrating into Sector Eight. Orac has enabled us to track the expansion of the pacification programme fairly accurately. We have footage taken on several Eight worlds." Avon slotted a cube into Fenn's creaky visplayer, and Deva watched the _Scorpio_ crew's faces: yes, they'd seen it before. Soolin's head went up; Tarrant's jaw tightened; Dayna's eyes were huge. He looked at the screen. Men and women on moving staircases, their heads shaved, numbers written across their foreheads. It couldn't be real.

"Rewind it," Blake said suddenly, his voice shocking against the pale, crooning voice of the soundtrack, and then when Avon didn't react immediately, " _Damn_ it, Avon, fucking _rewind_ it!"

Avon rewound it. Blake loomed, chewing his finger. "There," he said indistinctly. "There. Stop it there. Play it. Rewind it again."

"Oh, my God," said Deva softly, seeing what Blake had seen.

And then Blake, staring into Avon's face - no, staring past it, not as if he could read his features but as if his eyes could cut into Avon's head and get the information without having to go through Avon; and then, "Where exactly did you get this footage?"

"Zondor," said Avon indifferently. "Why?"

"Why?" Blake rewound the tape again, froze the frame. "Why? Because that's Jenna. You mean to tell me you didn't notice?"

"No. No, I didn't notice. Are you sure it's her?"

"I'm sure," said Blake and "Yes. Yes, that's her," said Fenn and "That must be how they knew about the Gauda base," said Pree.  
"They've got Zondor," said Deva numbly. "They've got Avalon. Fenn, can I get to your comms room? Excuse me, everyone."

 

FIVE

"Stop," said someone firmly.

"Hmm?" said Deva. He looked left and up to see who it was, and felt suddenly sick as his eyes adjusted to the not-screen-ness. He shut them, then opened them again, feeling a little better. It was Pree.

"Stop," she said again. "Now. You're tired, you're going to start fucking up, and then there'll just be more work for the rest of us. There's tea in the common room. Come on."

"I just," said Deva, and then turned his eyes back to the screen and felt a wash of nausea again. He gave up and followed Pree down the corridor.

Deva took a mug of tea off the trestle, went to sit on the square couch next to Pree, and put the mug down on the low table there.

"What's going on?" he asked Pree.

She rolled her eyes and pushed a wodge of her green dreadlocks back over her shoulder. "Grand palaver. Lots of arguing about whether to put the Gauda reunion on hold, and whether we should go and ally with a bunch of known traitors, and how many of the other bases we're going to have to shift now. Looks like Blake's going to be back and forth between here and Sector Eight from now till the great star crab sidles out and eats the heart of the Universe. Or what fucking ever."

"Where _is_ Blake?"

"Closeted with Avon," said Vila, with a slightly nasty edge to his voice.

"Shut up, Vila," said Dayna; then she turned unclear eyes towards Deva and added: "Sorry about _him_."

"Blake's pretty wound up about Jenna and Avalon," said Pree.

"They both are," said Dayna strongly.

"We all are," Pree snapped. "I was just warning Deva."

"Thanks," mumbled Deva. He drank some of his tea, which was very hot, and felt instantly exhausted. His wrists ached and his head hurt. He leaned back against the cushions.

Blake and Avon. Together again. Avon walking in to the tracking gallery on Gauda and the alarms sounding; Avon here on Amos-4 slipping his little record of Jenna's death into the meetings room, all unawares. Delivering a message he hadn't even known he was carrying.

He shook his head and looked up (meaning to start a conversation with the newcomers, anything, it didn't matter, just to see faces, people that weren't Jenna, walking dead Jenna) to see Tyce, Veron and Fenn come in. They came over in silence, walking tired (but not dead). Fenn lowered himself, careful with tiredness, onto a cushion, Veron sat upright on the edge of the table, Tyce half-fell to the floor and leaned her head against Pree's knee for Pree to stroke.

"Sorted?" asked Pree.

"Getting there," said Fenn. "Blake'll be going to Sector Eight when - "

"Veron?" someone interrupted. It took a second for Deva to connect this strange, hoarse voice with Vila. He glanced round, saw Vila's face, the frozen horror on it, and it shocked him into wakefulness.

"Veron Kasabi?"

"Vila Restal," she said, half-nodding gravely, a small, precise movement of the sort she often made to compensate for her face's clumsiness of expression.

"You two know each other?" said Dayna.

"Years ago. From the _Liberator_ ," Vila answered, still looking at Veron, though the horror was draining out of his face now so that he just looked incredibly sad. "From Earth. Central Control." And then, recovering himself slightly: "She - well, what I mean is there was a bit of a mix-up. You see, they had her mother and they said she could have her back if - well, anyway, then it turned out her mother was already dead. And Control wasn't all that much to write home about either, come to think of it."

"You certainly know how to present a clear summary of the facts," said Soolin, only half-heartedly sarcastic.

Vila ignored her. "I thought you were going to stay on Earth?"

"I did. That's where - " Veron finished the sentence by raising a finger to her right cheekbone, meaning the scarring that ran from her shoulder up her neck, over half her mouth, over her cheek, to just below her eye. "It was in the rebellion after the Galactic War. Towards the end, while Blake and Deva and I were trying to get off Earth."

"She still says she's going back, though," said Fenn.

"I am. I will be. We all will be. And, if you were wondering, that's when I'll get surgery. When we go back to Earth. When we win."

"And all the Domes will fall down," said Pree drowsily. "And there'll be trumpets. Trumpets and flowers and... I don't know, fucking butterflies."

"You're dreaming, Pree," said Tyce, knocking her head against Pree's knee. "Wake up."

"No. Bugger off. Leave me alone. I'm tired."

"Go to bed then."

"I'm staying up for Jenna and Avalon and the rest," said Pree, and a tear slid out from her closed eye. "I want to be with people who remember them."

Silence fell. Deva felt grief all the way through his bones, grief and fear, and something worse, something like envy. Something sick. Sometimes it felt like it would be a relief. Just take the drug, and nothing's ever your fault again.

Fenn broke the silence after a while, or the 'ching' of the bottle of brandy he put on the table broke it.

"We'll have a wake later in the week," he said. "Tonight, maybe we should just have a drink to them."

"Fuck the wake," said Tyce, sitting up suddenly. "We're getting them out."

"We can't," said Fenn flatly.

"Tell me why not."

"Well. We don't know that they're still alive. We don't know how to find them. There are two million people on Zondor. And, they've been adapted. They might as well be dead, Tyce. It's not Jenna and Avalon and Teko and Cinq and Yolanda any more."

"We've seen people come back from the dead before," she said scornfully. Deva felt something in him wake up in answer to her voice. "They drugged Blake. They killed his past and they killed his head. They broke my father. They killed his heart. They destroyed the _Liberator_. And here we all are."

"Not all," said Vila softly, but Tyce only glanced at him absently and carried on.

"I thought better of you, Fenn: I never thought you'd be one to give up on your friends."

"Damn it, Tyce, what the fuck do you want me to do? There's hundreds of millions of them out there like - that."

"There have always been hundreds of millions out there _like that_. Drugged, brainwashed, hopeless, enslaved. Don't you see, Fenn? That's what they _want_ us to think. That we can't fight the drug. It's like Star One. They _wanted_ us to think they had a weapon we couldn't find and we couldn't fight. It's the great illusion all over again. It's an _alibi_ , Fenn."

"Maybe. Maybe, Tyce, but I'm exhausted. If you won't drink to Jenna, let's drink for us. And we'll talk in the morning."

She slumped back suddenly. "All right. Pour me one too."

Pree reached over her head and poured the drinks, her other hand playing with casual affection in the hair above Tyce's right ear. Her face was sad and serious. "I think they're gone, Tyce. All our brave girls. Maybe tomorrow I'll wake up and you'll have got them back for me, but for tonight, fuck knows, I can't fight this fucking drug. Drink to the Zondor women with me."

Vila drained his glass, poured himself another, drained that, and said: "I'm going to bed."

Dayna and Soolin stared at him.

"I don't like all this talking about death," he said. "It's depressing." And walked out.

"What was all that about?" said Pree.

"Jenna was with Blake," said Veron.

"Yeah? So are you. So was I, for about five minutes last year."

"From the beginning. With Vila."

"He thought Jenna had got away," said Soolin. Everyone turned to look at her, the new one, the one fresh from the world outside, who might be able to tell them where Avon had been and what had been happening and why everything was like this. She smiled slightly, recognizing it. "He didn't like talking about the rest of them, but Jenna... He didn't mind so much because he thought she'd got away."

SIX

Meanwhile, "You might consider having corrective surgery if you're going to be taking on negotiations," said Avon, and Blake wouldn't have realised that he'd touched his scar then if he hadn't been watching Avon's eyes following his finger.

"No," said Blake and left the silence there as a challenge. He needed that scar, for all sorts of reasons. But maybe now Avon was back he wouldn't need it any more.

Avon shrugged the challenge away, so that the air between them was empty. "All right. That can work to our advantage. So long as it is not affecting your vision."

"Not in the way you mean." And it was below consciousness, but Blake was allowing himself to loom slightly, letting his voice rumble, setting his shoulders and thickening his presence in a certain way. And Avon wasn't reacting at all. Something that had been between them was - just not there any more. Dead air between them, dead space. Once Avon would have curled into that strength, snarling: not squaring himself against it like Jenna or hammering on it like Deva or folding under it like Vila. Fitted himself almost pleasurably into it and scratched.

It occurred to Blake that Avon hadn't asked him what had happened to his face.

"Good," Avon was saying. "A blind leader would perhaps have been a little... obvious." And the new smile.

Blake reached over and closed his fingers round Avon's lower arm.

Avon looked at Blake's hand, then at Blake's face. Eyebrows raised, mouth in a line which meant Who the hell are you?

"Yes?"

Once he would have said it in a voice that did what his body used to do when he went limp against Blake: soft, waiting. This voice was - just a man, talking. Or, it was harder, lower, thinner. A whole register of his voice was missing, the higher notes, the softer notes, that used to make his voice into a choir; the way his lips used to taste the insults as he said them. This voice had only one layer, and it came from a tight throat and clenched teeth. Blake wondered suddenly, irrationally, whether Zen would still have recognized his voice print.

"Avon," said Blake. A last try. He kept his own voice level, reasonable. "Why are you doing this? Why are you treating me like a stranger?" And then his hand moved, curled round the back of Avon's neck, and his little finger circled in the short hairs there.

Avon laughed shortly, moved Blake's hand away, back to Blake's lap, and dropped the hand.

"No," he said.

"You won't let me touch you."

Avon, staring past Blake's ear, his face tight and remote. "You don't have the right to ask that of me. I've done enough. This at least I can refuse."

"Avon, I - Do you think I'm asking for some sort of _payment_? What do you mean, I don't have the right?"

"I think you are asking me to give you something. Believe me, I have given you everything I have to give already. This past four years. If you want to survive - if you want _me_ to survive - accept it, be grateful, and leave me alone."

"I don't understand, Avon."

"No. Well, I'm sure that's not an entirely new experience for you."

SEVEN

Never anything specific: never _I loved Avon_ or _There was this time when Avon_ or even _Did you hear about the Liberator crew sabotaging the Teal-Vandor conflict_. But every now and again, _Avon would have said. Avon wouldn't have agreed to. Avon would have said_. And now Avon was here. _I was waiting for you_ , Blake had said, and that was news to Deva but of course at the same time it wasn't.

Somewhere down the corridor four years of Blake's life were being erased, being turned into four years of Avon-I-was-waiting-for-you. The four years with Deva in them.

Deva wrapped his arms round himself and felt trapped in a single thought, spiralling in on itself like a maze. There seemed no particular reason to do anything rather than anything else until Blake got in. If he got in. Blake, I'm waiting for you.

*

Blake came through the door, and there he was, and there Deva was not knowing how much had changed. For that second nothing was solid, and then there was Blake against him and Deva trying not to hold too tight. Oh God.

*

Usually they were good together. They knew each other so well now, and that translated itself into touch-me-there and then, and bite-me-just-that-hard and, but often, somehow, it happened in a way that could leave Deva startled and overwhelmed by the sheer, determined, single-minded force of Blake's attention. The difference tonight - no, there wasn't a difference. It wasn't even there. Or it was that Blake was surprised once or twice by Deva's height, expecting him to be an inch or two taller. Or it was that the part of the script they'd put together that explained how hard Blake could bite had been rewritten.

Afterwards in the fuzzy shadows, the quarter-light, all Blake's colours and curves were softened and Deva put his arms round him, feeling the shape of him, the space he took up, in his bed and in his life. Feeling the shape and the size of the hole there would be in his life if he lost Blake. Feeling as if there was an Avon-shaped envelope around him. He couldn't not ask.

"How did it go? With Avon? Is he - is he like you remembered?" Why haven't you told me already? Why did you pull me straight into bed? Because you love me or because you love him?

Blake thought for a moment. "It was," he said. He shifted under Deva's arm, or shivered. "It was - like meeting someone you haven't seen for four very long years. There's nothing there. Nothing." But the bleakness in his voice made that not reassuring at all.

EIGHT

Avon walked to his quarters. He opened the door, went in, and lay down on the narrow bed.

He closed his eyes.

Years ago. A memory he'd polished. It shone, lapidary, whole in itself, mysterious and closed. He picked it up. Blake's face; how beautiful he was. The precise length of his top lip, the particular angle of his jaw and his neck, would be the shape of the word 'love' for Avon forever, as the colour would always be the green-brown of Blake's eyes and the feel would be warmth and heaviness. His heart had grown around those particular shapes, like a scar preserving the shape of the thing that made it.

Blake's face at the moment he turned away from Avon to answer the wall communicator. Blake's hands on Avon's face as he turned back to kiss him before going to the flight deck. His eyes had been clear and warm; it couldn't have been an emergency. The memory was so smooth round the edges now that Avon couldn't remember what Blake had been summoned for, when it had happened. Just the line of the jaw, the short top lip, the clear eyes, the warm, gentle hands.

It had been real. This time it had been real. His dead lover. It was beginning to hurt less to remember him.

O western wind when wilt thou blow, that the small rain down may rain.

 _Blake is dead. He died from his wounds on the planet Jevron more than a year ago. I saw his body. I saw it cremated. Blake is dead_.

Yes.

There are only so many times you can live through the same joke. The amount of grief you can live with, on the other hand, appears to be infinite.


	3. Part Two

PART TWO

ONE

"Fuck, I need this," said Pree, dumping a tall glass on the table and flinging herself down on the couch. "The fucking day I've had, Tyce, I swear. I mean, I've fucking got enough on my plate since those _bastards_ got Zondor - Deva did a lot of the set-up last night, but basically we need to overhaul the whole security system on the comms, update all the voice banks... I could cry just thinking about it. I was _supposed_ to be working on that group in Renghall today - there's two or three there I want to keep an eye on - but now Fenn and Blake are all hot for Sector Eight and it looks like I'm going to have to run our side of that, you know, comms and research and stuff. Blake's leaving tomorrow, did you know? With Hask piloting."

"Good," said Tyce. "We can't hang about on this one."

"Oh, I know, I know. I'm just tired. Sorry." She gave Tyce a quick, rueful smile and a ruffly pat on the shoulder. "How are you holding up?"

"Too busy to think. Thank God."

"Yeah?"

"Yes. Work it out for yourself. This base is designed for fifteen people, tops, we've been running it with ten for the past year, and now nine more bodies show up, three of them injured. That means food and drugs and Lorida and Raq working double shifts in medical, but I haven't even had time to go on a supply run today because I'm desperately trying to fit the new bodies into the rotas."

"Oh fuck, I don't envy you _that_ job. I'm not surprised Blake and Jenna ran a fucking mile when they got the chance. Imagine being stuck on a ship with that bunch of wankers."

"I was," said Tyce reasonably. "Well, all right, not quite that bunch of wankers."

"Yeah, but you've said yourself there was only the three of them worth the money. Why does Blake have such fucking awful taste in men?"

"Deva's all right."

"I said _men_ ," said Pree, laughed loud and short, drained her drink, and lit a cigarette. Tyce refilled it quietly from the bottle on the table and let the casual queerphobia go this time.

"Fenn and me got about twenty minutes for lunch today," Pree went on, "and all of a sudden that sod Tarrant's in the room, all clean and neat like a good little soldier, taking up our whole break being told repeatedly that no, there's nothing he can do to help, thank you very much, unless he counts fucking off and leaving us alone. Not the brightest spark, that boy. I should think Space Command breathed a sigh of relief when they foisted him off onto our side. Hooray! they said. Let him take his panting eagerness somewhere it'll actually do the Federation cause some good!" She paused briefly and looked, surprised, at the cigarette she'd half-smoked.

"Bugger. That one slipped past. I'm supposed to be cutting down. Imagine the fucking ignominy of a glorious revolutionary soldier like me dropping dead of a heart attack on routine phys."

"Never used to bother you."

"Ah, I'm getting old, Tyce. I look at us now, I look at Veron and Dayna and whatsit, Soolin, and I think, fucking kids. I look at _you_ and I think you're a fucking kid. Then I think, good, maybe you'll live to see the glorious day, if I don't. Which I won't, because I'm going to drop dead of a heart attack from tabs and Tarrant."

"Oh, I can see I'm going to have hours of fun trying to fit the _Scorpio_ crew in here," said Tyce gloomily. "You really don't like that Tarrant, do you?"

"I don't like any of them," Pree said, and took a long drag on her cigarette. "They're trouble, and they're arrogant, and they're dim. They want resources, they want plans. What are we _doing_? What have we _got_? They haven't thought any further than getting hold of the master's tech so they can demolish his house. Fuck! Didn't they _notice_ they already blew up Star One and it _didn't fucking work_?" She smiled, a cracked smile, at Tyce.

"Ah," said Tyce.

"What?"

"I invited Dayna and Soolin for a drink."

"Oh, you bitch," said Pree, but without heat. "Okay. It'll give me a chance to check them out, anyway - Fenn reckons we need one of the Scorpio in on the Sector Eight team, seeing as they've been there and everything, and I thought I'd push for Soolin. Just don't let them get started on politics. And give me another drink."

TWO

"No-one uses Orac except me," said Avon. He seemed to have acquired a hairdryer from somewhere by now, but his hair still looked terrible. "It's all right" - he smiled at Deva - "I imagine I sleep even less than you do."

Deva smiled back, half-reluctantly, through a mixture of feelings. "All right," he said. "I'll ask Tyce to list us on the same shifts." _And then I can work closely, at great length, and under extreme stress, with Blake's ex-lover. What a treat. I think I preferred it when it was just the war_. "Did you have a particular project in mind?"

"Sleer," said Avon, his voice dead, his hands tensing slightly. "I want her tried and I want her executed."

"Well, I think we all do," said Deva. "I'd rather like President Rontane to step down, as well."

Avon flashed a quick look at him. "Removing Sleer from the pacification programme may well buy us some time. If we can set it up so that the programme appears to be primarily an attempt of Servalan's, not to serve the Federation but to get herself back into power, it may buy us more than that."

"Servalan is dead," said Deva. "She died in the rearguard action at Gedden, almost a year ago."

"Did you see the body?" said Avon softly, then blinked and carried on. "Let me assure you, Servalan is alive. I had the pleasure of doing business with her a few months ago, and although I doubt anyone who heard me address her by her real name is still alive, she seems to be getting a little careless about protecting her new identity."

"Doing business with her?"

"In a manner of speaking."

A highly metaphorical one, Deva hoped, then shook the thought away to let himself feel the possibilities rising in him. "In that case... You're right, Avon, this should take priority. When do you want to start?"

"I have already started. Shall I brief you tomorrow morning?"

THREE

Blake was knackered. And angry. Sector Eight - seven interlinked star systems with an anomalously long history of independence from the Federation - was going to be a critical point in the Pacification Programme; everything Pree and Soolin had found out pointed to that. And - well, _and_ nothing. As far as he was concerned, that was all there was to it.

He smiled tiredly, leaning on the print-key at the door to his room, hearing Pree's voice in his head ( _Oh yes, Blake, just point out how important it is and all peoples will put their petty squabbles aside and unite in harmony against the Federation... you fucking idiot. Do you call what's going on on Khom petty?_ )

No, Pree, he thought, but it's not my fight. I'm not looking to create a Utopia on every planet. I'm trying to keep enough people free enough to think enough to realize they have to fight the Federation. _Have to_.

He went in, looked round the room for a moment as if it didn't make any sense, as if it were a trick photograph, and then dropped himself into an armchair, letting his head fall back and his arms dangle, feeling the cushions hold him; closed his eyes, sighed, opened his eyes, raised his head and looked round the room again. It was deep and windowless. It smelt anonymously clean. He fitted into it, instead of it fitting round him.

There was a bed, in case he should want to sleep (though at the moment it was uninhabitably covered with the contents of his case); a desk and upright chair, in case he should want to work; two armchairs nearly-facing each other, their precisely angled feet laying out geometrically the relation he was expected to have with the person in the other chair: friendly, but no staring deep and close into the other's eyes (that being something else he could use the bed for, he supposed). And there was a jug of water on the shelf by the bed in case he should want to drink water, and a small box near the armchairs that he hoped was there in case he should want to drink liquor. He opened the door of the box and found an anonymously well-chosen selection: something for everyone and nothing quite perfect for anyone.

It was the kind of room that was enough to make anyone feel discouraged about the state of relations, interplanetary or interhumanoid. He thought about walking into the meetings room and almost groaned again at the memory: he hated that photograph. 'Blake in the rubble on Earth', mid-shout, mid-shot: it got everywhere. In this case, it had got to almost the whole surface of one of the walls in the big, blind room where the negotiations were taking place.

Like the bedroom, it was supposed to be a compliment.

It had started as soon as they landed on Khom. People watching behind the barriers at the dock, mostly women and children, a few men, looking lined-but-young: a quiet sigh. _Blake. That's Blake_. That name, itching, like dirty clothes.

A friendly young man had hurried him and Hask down the path between the sighs. There were people trying to move forward to press against the barriers; and there were people holding them back, people in uniforms. It was a very quiet crowd. Blake had caught a few eyes, trying to work out what was going on - a hero's welcome? An appeal? A freakshow?

As the friendly young man half-pushed them forward into the shuttle building, Blake had heard a half-shout, suddenly cut off, behind him. He had turned, on instinct, but there was nothing to see. Except a quiet crowd of people all looking at a single, empty spot amongst them.

All right. He'd seen that before. Rebels, and not all of them were better than the neutral governments, and very few of them had the resources he needed.

He poured himself a drink of pleasant-enough whisky and lit a cigarette. He didn't smoke, but sometimes when he was away from Deva he did.

FOUR

It would have been mindbendingly painstaking, slow, difficult, risky work. Before any slow, small step forward could be taken there would have been half a day of elaborate checks and cross-checks. The sort of thing Deva did best, if joylessly and painfully.

The sorts of thing Avon did best, it seemed, were chucking circuitry about flamboyantly and crossing swords with Orac in a menacing drawl. Not that Deva was knocking it; it was working. Somehow. And he was starting to learn that it wasn't just a case of telling Orac to Trojan its way through President Rontane's firewalls and tell them what was there. He was starting to learn what Orac could do: mostly monitor transmissions. Make mindbendingly painstaking, slow, difficult, risky work into ordinarily painstaking and risky work. Trace links. Trace people. Find impossible photographs (Avon's shorthand for the sort of anomalies in the records they were looking for).

Deva took a sip of his tea, which was stone cold, regretted doing so, and looked surreptitiously at Avon, who was staring into the circuitry of the back of one of Pree's cannibalised comm stations. (He looked slightly harried, and Deva didn't blame him: he'd once asked Pree how a boosted transmitter she'd given him worked and she'd looked at him blankly and said "I don't know. Bodged it together. It _does_ work, doesn't it? Have you tried thumping it?")

Trace people.

Four years.

Deva thought of the weeks after the rebellion, when it was just him and Blake and Veron, how he had won-and-lost everything. It was precisely losing everything - everything that had defeated him for so many years - that had been the victory, for him.

Those weeks: how he could scarcely believe that this was Blake, here, in his arms; lying awake on the narrow bunk in the narrow cabin, waiting for Blake to come to him. Some nights he had, some nights he hadn't. Fighting their way off Earth, out of the Sol system, in that clapped-out cruiser.

And eventually Blake had moved into Deva's room for good. Was it in defeat? He'd never said so. He hadn't talked about the people who were missing from the battles on Earth: Jenna, Cally, Vila. Avon. But it must have felt like just another gamble, lost. Control had been an empty room, Star One had been an empty threat, Avon an empty promise. Another X on the map.

Four years. Four fucking years. And now he's back.

"Deva," said Avon blankly, "how does this work?"

He couldn't help smiling, but then the intracom buzzed and Fenn's voice came through. "Deva. Avon. Pree's found something. You'd better come through."

*

And there they all were again, sat round the table like that first meeting - except that this time it was Avon sitting next to Deva because Blake wasn't there, Blake was with Hask in Sector Eight talking to the people who'd betrayed and tried to kill Avon and all his crew, and this time it was Fenn standing by the screen. His heavy, slightly lined face was like a caricature of itself, longer, sagging into miserable folds. One brown dreadlock had come out of his pigtail and it hung down over his eye. Pree sat in front of him, at the head of the table, her back to the screen; she didn't look any better than Fenn.

 _Blake_ , Deva was thinking, over and over. _It's Blake. Oh God_.

Once they were all in Fenn took a deep, wobbly breath and said: "This came in today. Pree picked it up on a long-range sweep. It looks as though they were waiting until after the Gauda raid." And started the vizplay.

She looked - absolutely fine. Better than when he had last seen her, in fact. She sounded cheerful. That was the worst thing.

"I'll be pleading guilty, of course. I'm told that there is some possibility that the Administration may be able to find useful work for me to do after my rehabilitation, to compensate for the damage we've caused here on Zondor, and I'm very grateful for that. I can't ask the people of Zondor to accept my apologies, but I can hope that in some small way I can show you that I mean what I say."

And then back to the newsreader: "Because of the nature of her activities, spanning a number of worlds and even sectors, Stanis will now be taken to Earth for trial. Avalon, the other leader of the terrorist group LZ, and the other provocateurs rounded up yesterday have been dealt with on Zondor. President Rontane has - "

Fenn stopped the tape, jabbing the button viciously as if he could erase it - better, make it not-true - and President Rontane along with it.

"Jenna's alive," said Tyce instantly, and Veron, opposite her, gave a small smile, a small, serious nod of approval. "Let's go and rescue her."

Pree laughed suddenly, a real laugh. It flashed across her face and across the room and then it was gone. "Let's," she said, looking at Tyce with affection.

FIVE

Fenn was sitting behind his desk, feeling his base stretch out around him, a little quieter and deader than it had been a couple of days ago, since Blake and Hask had left for Sector Eight. He listened to the silence of another new configuration of people still settling into place in their absence. It had been a strange farewell in the dock, the usual energies of fear and hope and fierce love that wrapped around the departing crew (around Blake) disrupted - reconfigured - by the cooler, darker energies of the new people, Avon's crew. Although Avon himself had not been there.

He sighed, and reluctantly pulled up the original work rotas for the week on his terminal. They'd been drawn up about a month ago, before the Gauda raid and everything else, and he just wanted to see how far behind the normal business of the base had got, before he got on with the plans he was even more reluctant to think about. Tyce and her fucking bulldozer naivete. Rescuing Jenna. Fucksake.

A couple of depressing minutes later, the door buzzed and Tarrant's voice said: "Fenn? I asked if I could see you when I came off shift."

"Come in," said Fenn, suppressing the shudder of distaste he felt when he heard Tarrant's voice. Oh, there didn't seem to be much wrong with the lad (although he wasn't someone Fenn would have chosen to work with: more Amben's style, or perhaps he should have been off training the head-hunted Gauda recruits, if there had still been a base on Gauda). It was just - that voice. Not just the educated, Earth, upper-grade tones; it was the Space Command training in every syllable, what they called "authority" and he called - well, he didn't call it anything, usually, he just spat on the ground when he heard an officer passing. Every individual voice that went into Space Command was trained into a single voice, one he'd grown up hating.

Tarrant walked in to stand before the desk, and it was there in his body too, in the lines of energy that ran through him, all right angles and spikes, like machinery. Fenn took a breath and looked at his eyes, their bravado, the youth and uncertainty of his mouth, and tried to like Tarrant a little better.

"What was it you wanted, Tarrant?"

"I wanted to ask if I could be involved in the mission. I've had an idea about how it could work and I'd - With all due respect, Fenn, we're getting restless, Dayna and myself. We'd like to be of more - active use. Soolin's working with Pree as back-up on the Sector Eight alliance, Avon's been holed up with Deva for three days already on the Sleer plan, and there's only so many hours a day we can train."

And if he tried, yes, Fenn could read the machine-energy from Tarrant as tension and eagerness to serve, and he could like him a little better.

"What's your idea?"

"Well, it depends on - May I sit down?"

"Sure."

"It depends on the route the prison ship is going to take. If it takes one of the regular Federation traffic routes from Eight to One, _Scorpio_ should be able to intercept it early on its flight, close to the border of Seven and Eight, which would give Hask time to join us as back-up from Khom."

"How fast can that ship go?"

"Time distort fifteen. And she has teleport capability. And we have a very talented thief. So... if Hask covered _Scorpio_ while she manoeuvred into teleport position, Hask and I might be able to take out the escort craft in the time it took a small team - including Vila, unfortunately but necessarily - to pick the locks, and reach Jenna. Hask could make a run for it while _Scorpio_ flies back into teleport range to get the rescue team - and Jenna - off the _Beijing_."

Fenn stared at him.

"I think it would be possible, Fenn."

Tarrant shifted his weight slightly from one foot to the other and his energy shifted with it - left foot: seeking approval from CO; right foot: I have spoken, men. Fenn barely had time to feel it before he was round the desk and throwing his arms round Tarrant and kissing him soundly on the cheek. Tarrant flinched back into touch-me-not angles, and Fenn let him go.

"That's brilliant, Tarrant," he said. "We'll have a meeting tonight. I don't know if it could work, but fuck, I hope so. Thank you."

"That's all right." And in the voice there was the slightest trace of officer-class amusement-contempt, far above emotion and human contact - _but fuck it_ , thought Fenn. _It doesn't matter whose the equipment is, it matters whose side it's working for_.

SIX

Blake woke up in the night in a half-empty bed, and kicked irritably at the covers lying smooth and flat against the mattress on the other side, and kicked again, sprawling into the cold half, turning over, sprawling along the other diagonal. Either way, he was left with entirely too much room to manoeuvre. Which, after the first two days on Khom, one would have thought would be a pleasant change.

Seven systems, each with their own alliances and disalliances and agendas and vocabularies and traditions. Manoeuvring in the narrow cracks between, and all the time trying to do it in the frame someone else had set up. Avon had set up, all right, Avon. Avon, Avon, _Avon_. Avon, who'd set up this negotiation - beautifully, if somewhat over-elaborately: Blake would have recognized Avon's handiwork, his pleasure in his machinations, anywhere - set it up with a carefully blank, carefully determined space for Blake to fit into and start the machinery going.

Oh, it was never anything specific: just that meetings room, which managed to be both vast and stuffy, and the smoothness of the planetary rulers' manners smoothing his objections into their proper place ( _Avon promised us... We were assured by your colleague that..._ ). And that bloody photograph splashed over the whole wall behind him like a literal reminder that he was too small for his reputation, for his name.

Using his name as the lie, the trigger for contempt, in the bounty-hunter routine - it hadn't been an accident. Deva called it self-indulgent (frequently and loudly). Deva, who'd written a computer program to diagnose trust.

Deva and Avon. Sometimes he thought both of them would like to automate him.

Missing Avon was easier at a distance.

At first he had told himself that Avon had to come to him. You can't drop a much bigger hint than _I've always trusted you_ ; and you can't drop a much bigger hint than _when you go to Earth, I will take the_ Liberator _, and I will be free of you_. Well, Blake had gone to Earth, Avon had taken the _Liberator_ , and... well, that was that. And then, later, he had thought about it less. Except that it was odd that, from what he had heard, Avon seemed to have kept everything he had least valued about Blake, and thrown away - or lost - everything he had most valued.

Of course, in some ways Blake had done that too.

He sighed and went to turn the light on. His four-in-the-morning hand went unerringly to the wrong place, and then he had to scrabble for a few seconds to find the button: three inches higher than he had been expecting. His whole day had been like that.

Oh, fuck it. Everything had been like that since Avon had walked into the tracking gallery on the Gauda base. The world had shifted half an inch to the left and he was - not lost in it, but not familiar. All the things his body knew where to find, suddenly rearranged. All the habits he had developed, suddenly unhelpful.

Not such a useful part of the machine after all, he thought, and grinned suddenly. He might get lost in the leaders' smoothness, where Avon, he thought, would probably have waded in it for pleasure; but one thing he was good at was seeing where that smoothness snagged.

The various rebel groups in the sector weren't represented, or admitted to, at negotiations, but they were easily inferrable from the length of particular silences, particular unanswered questions, carefully vague emphases on cross-border policing and extradition agreements: and from the blank place, the snag, in the smooth welcoming crowd when he'd arrived.

What was it Pree always said? Something about not being able to demolish the master's domes with the master's machinery. Being a spanner in the works was much more his style, anyway.

He turned over, settled in the middle of the bed, and fell asleep in the middle of working out counter-arguments to all the objections Hask would have.


	4. Part Three

PART THREE

ONE

Back on _Scorpio_ , and she wasn't responding quite right; a slight drag on the starboard side of the hull. Not much, but Tarrant didn't trust Slave to compensate, so it had been manual much of the way, and it was certainly manual now, as they approached the target zone.

 _She_? Tarrant thought idly, with the part of his mind that wandered behind all the parts that stayed sharp (course, status, scanners). He glanced up at Tyce and Dayna, crashed out on the flight deck couches beside Vila, and wondered what this ship, this wreck with its secret heart of power, had in common with either of them. The people that reminded him of _Scorpio_ were men: Dorian, Avon. Blake? He hadn't made his mind up yet.

"I beg to inform you, Sir, as you requested, that flight time to the co-ordinates is now thirty minutes. I hope this is - "

"Yes, Slave, thank you." He hated that thing.

The women - brisker and more efficient than _Scorpio_ ever was - shook themselves out of sleep. Vila yawned and stretched. His face lit with wakefulness for a second and then settled back into its usual sour pre-mission expression.

"Good morning," Tarrant said.

Tyce came round to stand behind him. "How is it? Are we on course?"

"All according to plan."

"And you're sure that wobble isn't going to screw up the manoeuvre?"

"I'm sure."

"Good. Let's run through it just one more time, then I want to warm up."

TWO

... static.... hum of a ship's drive... static... "Come _on_ , damnit!" (Hask's voice)... "Vila, hurry up!" - "I'm working as fast as I can! This isn't the _London_ , you know, this is a maximum-security transport for politicos... Ah. There." - "Have you done it?" - "Nearly. Nearly. Wait - just - a - There!" - "Moving out, Tarrant"... static... footsteps on metal... "Out of range, _Scorpio_. Well flown. Thank you" (Hask's voice) -

"Received. _Atwood_ is out of range. And well flown yourself."

... static... footsteps on metal... "What the f-" ... gunshots from a _Scorpio_ gun... "All right, Tarrant" - "On target. This should be - " - " _Fuck_!" - "All right, Tarrant" - "Hello, Jenna. Put this bracelet on, please" - "Thank you. Is it time for my meds again?" (unfamiliar voice, female) - "No. No. No" (Tyce's voice, barely audible, over and over again in the background) - "Veron! Quick!" ... gunshots from a Federation gun gunshots from a _Scorpio_ gun ... "I don't like this" (Vila's voice, muttering) - "Ready for teleport, Tarrant, whenever you are."

That had been Dayna's voice. Unflappable as ever. He smiled as he operated the teleport, and the smile faded out as their bodies faded in to the bay.

 _They must have put a wig on Jenna for the broadcast_ , he thought, and then, appalling himself with the laughter that threatened, _Must be a change for Vila to have more hair than anyone around him_. It wasn't the brutally naked head, though, it was her face that he was escaping when he turned away from her, back to the controls.

Compensating for the _Beijing's_ energy field. Manoeuvring away. Away.

THREE

"You're going to have to do that yourself," said Avon.

"It would be a lot quicker with Orac," Deva said neutrally.

Avon looked at him.

"Unlike Sleer, Orac is _not_ difficult to track. He signs his name everywhere he goes, unless the most comprehensive precautions are taken. You may begin learning how to take those precautions, if you wish, or we could try and nail Sleer _this_ year."

The only possible way to work with Avon was to think of him as having a medical condition that made the simplest communications sound like particularly vicious sallies in an ongoing undeclared war. And then try and work out what his statements would boil down to if he weren't so-tragically ill.

What this one boiled down to was shitwork. It had taken all day to hand-cull something like a thousand files, and maybe Deva should have waited till the next morning, to be fresh, before he asked Orac to run the decrypt - but it had been a boring, joyless day, and he wanted to see what he'd got before he went to bed. And he wanted something to take his mind off Jenna, walking dead now around the base - or at least, since her movements had had to be restricted, walking from endless checks and tests of stimulant drug combinations in medical, to endless sessions of memory therapy with Vila and Tyce in the meeting room. It was like having a ghost and a blast of Federation propaganda, all rolled into one, on the base.

It was the very end of their shift, and although the room they were working in wasn't one of the few in the base that had natural light, it felt late: it felt twilit, bluish. It was something in the way the light sifted down through the shadows of the beams in the ceiling, something in the quality of the sounds: Soolin's voice ("I didn't say that, Vila") drifted down the corridor outside, on her way to the canteen. Avon was in a corner with a pile of circuitry and a laser probe, and there was a certain serenity in the way he held his hands that added to the twilight feeling.

"I need to run the decrypt," said Deva.

"You'll miss your dinner," said Avon, not looking up.

"I'm not hungry."

"All right," said Avon, and threw Orac's key over to him. "Bring it to my room if you're not finished before I leave."

Which he wasn't, quite. Avon faded out while Deva was still checking through for links - odd how he could leave so imperceptibly, when the difference between a room containing Avon and a room not containing Avon was emphatic.

Yes. There. Deva lit a cigarette, not taking his eyes off the screen. It looked solid: all the cross-checks had come out even. A few hundred files, a few thousand links, and looked at from the right angle, it was another little flag saying SERVALAN IS SLEER, like a labyrinth viewed from above and suddenly turned into a picture.

+If you have quite finished,+ said Orac, +I do have more important researches of my own to be getting on with. I believe you can continue with the rest of your tasks perfectly adequately with the help of your own machine.+

"Machine?" said Deva, cheerfully, responding to the distaste at the word in Orac's voice, and reached over to pull Orac's key out, slipping it into his pocket to take it to Avon later. In the meantime, he shifted from the chair by the main screen to the chair by his own terminal, and started opening files to extract what they would need. Balkor (deceased), head of Space Command-Psych liaison, work history. Project Terminal: evaluation, projections (likely to have good results on targeted subjects, but expensive in process all the way from the targetting to the implementation), synopsis...

And there it was. The impossible photograph.

Literally.

Deva stared for a second, then a minute.

Avon standing over a bed, his mouth turned so far down it made his face sag into the fleshiness he usually tensed out of it, his eyes soft, looking incredibly down at Blake. Blake in the bed, bearded, wires on his temples, looking matter-of-factly up at Avon. Dated eighteen months ago, by which time Blake had been on Gauda.

More images. Avon backing out of the room, not taking his eyes off Blake. Sound file: "...dead/ I - saw him, I spoke to him and he/You"

Deva put his cigarette out with one hand and reached over to put Orac's key in with the other.

"Orac," he said, and lit another cigarette.

FOUR

Deva leant back and lit another cigarette, feeling peculiar.

 _This doesn't make any sense. Take it away_.

So every two years or so, Avon had a sudden overwhelming whim to find Blake. Something hormonal, maybe, like a spawning salmon. And last time it had cost him the _Liberator_ , and this time it had cost him... what?

Avon wasn't scarred, but when he and Blake had faced each other on Gauda, it wasn't just Blake's face that had changed from that photograph (it was still there on the terminal, full of its impossible histories and silent). Avon's face: older, yes, harder, yes, but tighter, too, as if a layer had been stripped from it, the softness of his eyes in the impossible photograph, the fleshiness.

Deva felt unsettled, staring at and past this impossible Blake, jolted by the meeting of parallel lines. Was this the Blake that had been waiting for Avon? And had he been left behind with the _Liberator_ and the bombing runs and the full use of his left eye, or was he here all along? Which one did Blake see in a mirror? Which one did Deva see when he looked at Blake?

The base stretched out round him, quiet, empty of Blake, without answers. A few footsteps - people switching places on the late shifts - going past the door.

Or, of course, through it. Deva turned round, and there was Avon, in colour and all three-dimensional.

He looked at the screen again, involuntarily guilty, and there they both were, looking at Avon with Blake.

"Private researches?" said Avon politely.

"Don't you _knock_?"

"I apologize," said Avon, in a tone which made it quite clear he didn't. "However, there was nothing illegal about Servalan's actions on - Terminal - and perhaps your time might be better spent on something else. As might Orac's," he added, pulling the key out through Orac's heartfelt agreement.

"Don't be stupid," said Deva. "Do you think she'd set up something as complex as this and only use it once?"

Avon went inhumanly still, tightening his hands around Orac. "What do you mean?"

"I mean that *this* is the same technology - most of the same team of scientists - she used to protect the Sleer identity and kill off Servalan."

"Are you sure?" Avon was all motion again.

"Of course I'm sure." _And fuck you_. "What do you think I've been doing all night? Looking for blackmail photos?"

Avon leaned in and switched off the monitor: Avon-and-Blake shrank to a dot, faded to black, but he kept his eyes on the screen.

"I'm not very susceptible to blackmail," he said. "Notorious criminals rarely are."

"Good thing I wasn't trying, then," said Deva impatiently, and turned his monitor back on.

FIVE

"I'll be pleading guilty, of course."

Jenna was watching, impassive and motionless, her face blanked of everything but half-intelligent interest.

"I'm told that there is some possibility that the Administration may be able to find useful work for me to do after my rehabilitation, to compensate for the damage we've caused here on Zondor, and I'm very grateful for that. I can't ask the people of Zondor to accept my apologies, but I can hope that in some small way I can show you that I mean what I say."

And then the newsreader: "Because of - "

Jenna was rocking back and forth now, her arms going round herself, as if she was trying to control the deep shudders going through her.

Tarrant turned the screen off and glared at Vila.

"I told you this was a bad idea."

Vila had his arm around Jenna's shoulders, stroking and patting her gently, rocking with her. He ignored Tarrant completely.

"That's me," Jenna said. Her voice was distorted and strange; she sounded less like herself than the casual, cheerful voice from the broadcast had. "That's me, but I wouldn't do that. I didn't do it, but it was me. How...? Vila..."

"You went away and someone broke into your quarters," Vila was saying softly. "That's all. That's all. We'll readjust it all. It's going to be all right."

Tarrant watched Jenna and uninvited memories floated in his body: the therapy sessions when he enlisted in Space Command. Learning to be a good soldier, from the outside in - teaching the body to react before the mind - and from the inside out. It had broken a couple of his classmates. Not him, though. Never him. He was a good soldier, then and now.

Jenna had stopped shaking now, and was sitting limp and silent in the circle of Vila's arm, tolerating it.

Tyce glanced at Tarrant. She was white and tired. Tarrant tried to smile at her; the movement felt unpracticed, unfamiliar.

"You should go and rest," he said to Jenna, and winced immediately, trying to take the words back.

"I should go and rest," Jenna agreed, her face becoming bland and calm. She got up, leaving Vila's arm dangling, and walked out without looking at any of them.

Vila passed a hand over his face and Tarrant wondered how he had ever thought it was difficult to tell when Vila was faking exhaustion, fear, grief, anger. For once he passed the bottle over before Vila could reach for it.

"Thanks," said Vila absently. He watched himself pouring, the emotion draining from his face as the glass filled up. "Shouldn't you go with Jenna?"

"There's a guard on the comms room and security round entrances and exits has been doubled," said Tyce. "It should be all right. How are you feeling?"

"Like a Tarzian warg on the wrong side of a Tarzian warg strangler."

"Which side's the wrong side?"

"The inside."

"We knew it was going to be hard," said Tyce mostly to herself.

"You thought it was going to be hard. I knew. I'm the only one that's done this before, remember."

"What?" said Tarrant incredulously. "When have you done this before?"

"Before your time, youngster. Blake's not the only one that was adjusted, you know. And then there was - oh, Atlan or something. Oh yes, those were interesting times." Vila shivered, then went on. "No-one stayed the same from one day to the next. Little machines that got into your brain, alien possession..."

"Alcoholic psychosis," Tarrant added, moving the three-quarters-empty bottle away from Vila.

"Hey!"

Tarrant looked at Tyce. She made a face at him, and he moved the bottle back towards Vila, sighing.

 

SIX

Avon walked to his quarters. He opened the door, went in, put Orac on the desk and sat down.

 _The same technology, the same team..._ How very poetic.

More prosaically - and more to the point - how had she done it?

He put in Orac's key and started working. Work histories, project histories, early experiments... RC1.

Listening to the message for the first time in four years, he started laughing. Well, he'd always wondered.

 _Ralli to Cauder, Ralli to Cauder. Top priority message. Top security._

 _Attained co-ordinates. Blake is missing, presumed dead in the fighting on Jevron. He didn't make the shuttle out to Epheron with the rest of them and no craft has left Jevron since then. Repeat, Blake is missing, presumed dead. I'm terminating this mission and will return to Albian as soon as I can. Suggest this news is suppressed as far as possible. Ralli out._

The first death. It had hardly counted; just one more message, one more rumour in the thousands they had picked up. Seeing Servalan on Obsidian, he'd wondered how many of them had been hand-planted. Maybe now he could find out. For all the good that would do.

Early experiments... AB1. Start at the beginning.

 _Avon to Blake. Message received and understood. Avon out._

Impossibly hearing his own voice, he felt the room sway and break around him, felt it so powerfully he thought the base was under attack for a second: but it wasn't the base, it was just the world, and history, and time.

 _Avon to Blake. Message received and understood. Avon out._

What message?

Notes on message AB1.

 _After we received message BL1 strenuous efforts were made to block subsequent messages on this channel, encrypt and voice print. It was impossible to ascertain whether such efforts were successful, hence the need for diffusion tactics: KA's voice print was used to answer messages on this channel/encrypt/print (see appendix I), and further messages on various CEPs were seeded (see appendix II)._

Appendix One. Avon in the dark room, eyes open on the darkness, listening to Blake's voice.

 _Blake to Liberator. Blake to Liberator. I am safe and uninjured, as reported, and en route to Epheron. I will contact you when I make planetfall. Blake out._

MESSAGE: BL2

 _Blake to Liberator. We have landed safely on Epheron. You can reach me on this channel and my co-ordinates on the planet are 4:23 by 6:99. Blake out._

MESSAGE: BL3

 _Blake to Liberator. Blake to Avon._

 _Avon, there's a smuggler ship leaving Epheron for Earth in two days. I'm going to be on it. I can't wait any longer. I started this, I have to see it through to the end, and this is our best chance to finish it._

 _Zen says you're all unharmed. I'm glad. Keep it that way, will you?_

 

Message received and understood.

SEVEN

Tyce was sitting at the desk, her arms on the desk, her head on her arms. It was dark and quiet, greyish light falling diffidently over her from the window in the opposite wall and reflecting off the screen in the wall above the desk, which was showing a picture of Tyce and Avalon and Pree and Fenn and Jenna the night before the women's cell left for Zondor. Most of them had their mouths and eyes extravagantly wide-open for the camera: you could only see the top of Pree's head, which was bent down towards the pockets of her trousers, presumably hunting for cigarettes.

Or it could have been a picture of her father on the day of his re-investiture as President of Lindor, with his statesman's smile fighting his real smile. It didn't really matter. The point was that she'd put her life on the line to rescue a friend and come away with a cheap holo: it looked like Jenna, sometimes it even talked like Jenna, but it wasn't her any more. Which meant that no-one was Jenna any more. Stupid Tyce, always charging in, clutching at straws like a sword of righteousness: it was just that the one of the first straws she'd clutched had been, it had been Blake.

Fenn put his head round the door. "Tyce," he began, "have you seen Pree?" and then: "Are you all right?"

She looked at him sideways. "No," she said, and started crying again.

He went over and put his arms round her, crouching awkwardly by the chair. "What is it?"

"I'm just... sick of it. Sick of failed rescue missions. We're losing, Fenn. Step by step, we're losing. And it's so _slow_..."

"Is this about Jenna? Who was it who told me we hadn't lost her?"

"That was before she got here," said Tyce. She looked at him. He felt the patterns of heaviness in her like a weight on his own body, and stopped feeling them, with a small deliberate mental push.

"Do you know where Pree is?"  
"Oh, for... Yes. She's in Renghall, at a meeting. Why?"

"I want to talk to her."

"Obviously," said Tyce coldly, pulling a little out of the hug.

"Oh, fuck, Tyce, I don't have time for this." Fenn rocked back on his heels and stood up, suddenly sick of having to be the calm one: Tyce and her storms, Pree and her rages, Fenn and his level bloody head.

"Hearts can starve as well as bodies."

"Yeah, well, all our hearts are going to starve if we don't sort this out. Blake's in trouble with three planetary governments..."

"What?"

"... and it looks like he and Hask might have lost the ship."

"What?" said Tyce again. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"I was tending to your starving heart."

"Fuck you, Fenn," she said absently, rummaging through the drawers of her desk. "Ah. Here we go."

She handed Fenn a small black box. He looked at it.

"This is a battery for a ground car, Tyce."

"Was a battery. Now it's half of Pree's emergency private comm. Tell me what's going on and I'll get her back here."   
"Blake got pissed off with the governments on Khom and Tarl and made contact with the local resistance. The governments got pissed off with him and he thinks he's under unofficial house arrest. He and Hask are going to try and get off Khom on a resistance ship."

"Oh _God_ , we've lost another ship, haven't we? Doesn't he - no, never mind. Go and get Veron and Deva, I'll get on to Pree."

EIGHT

Avon pushed Orac's key down softly, started to speak, stopped, closed his eyes, and stood for a moment, his fingers carefully spread around the sharp corners of the casing. It was half possessive, half as if he needed support to keep him from falling. Deva watched him, hardly daring to breathe in case it impossibly screwed up the delicate threads they'd put in place together. This was it.

"Initiate, Orac."

Two minutes of humming. Deva watched his own fingers flexing and relaxing, watched Avon's forceful forced stillness.

+Results are as follows,+ said Orac, and the screen gave its electronic mew as it powered up. Orac talked, giving times, dates, a dispassionate and precise voiceover to the images smooth and silent on the screen. President Rontane in his office. Jump cut. Space; a chart of the galaxy, zooming smoothly in to Zone Alpha, Sector Eleven, Rephlar-One. Jump cut. Sleer in her office, sitting at her desk, doing nothing, uncannily; looking as if she'd been switched off. Looking like a still photograph, although the leaves of the plant on her desk wave slightly in the air-conditioned breeze. Jump cut. Troopers - no, from the badge, a Commander and an escort of troopers - surrounding her silently. Jump cut. Sleer standing, facing the troopers, silent, blank-faced. Zoom out. Rephlar-One, Sector Eleven, Zone Alpha. Zoom in. Sector One, Earth. A court room. Sleer in the dock. The screen behind the Chief Justice displaying: TR103/TREASON CN043/CONCEAL WHEREABOUTS CR224/EMBEZZLING TR644/ DISSIDENCE TR279/CONCEAL INFORMATION GUILTY ON ALL COUNTS.

Guilty on all counts. Deva felt muscles he hadn't known were tense relax. He dropped his shoulders and turned to Avon to smile.

Avon was still looking at the screen, which had faded now to grey. The line of his mouth was a hieroglyphic for loss. He blinked suddenly, turned to Deva, and smiled in a way which might well have been meant as reassuring. Instead of speaking to Deva, though, he made a little grimace and turned to Orac.

"Orac, is this a prediction?"

+It is an immutable certainty - +

Avon laughed; Deva shivered.

\+ - provided the necessary conditions are established before the program is actually run.+

"And we have taken measures to ensure that those conditions are met."

+We have. I suggest further checks on these measures be run before a time is fixed for the transmission of the evidence to the President's office.+

"Estimated time needed to run these checks."

+I estimate two full work shifts of ten hours for manual checks. If you would allow me to carry out the direct intercept function for which I was designed the time could be substantially reduced.+

"Just trust you?" Avon murmured. "That's weak, Orac, by your standards." And something too fast and wild for Deva to identify it flashed across his face as he pulled out Orac's key.

"Two days," said Deva, almost to himself, and hesitated. He wanted to celebrate, but there seemed no way he could begin to celebrate with this man; to translate the strange, circuitous intimacy of the work into some kind of relationship between himself and Avon. Given that what was between him and Avon was the impossible photograph, floating at the back of Deva's vision, the image of a Blake who was a stranger to him.

"Yes, Deva?" said Avon - smooth again, which woke Deva up to the fact that he'd been staring at Avon for a full minute.

"Let's go for a drink," he said before he could think about it any more. "To celebrate."

Avon hesitated, then said: "All right."

*

Fenn's common room was empty, apart from the two of them; it was three-quarters of the way through a shift and most people were either working or sleeping. Avon was sitting at right angles to Deva on the three-corners-of-a-square couch, clutching a glass - but not actually scowling. Not with his face, anyway.

Deva poured the drinks - from a bottle he'd had stashed in his quarters, Blake's favourite whisky - and raised his glass for Avon to clink. It seemed to take him a second to work out what was required of him, but then he clinked, raising an eyebrow at Deva - what are we drinking to?

"We've done it," said Deva.   
"Almost," said Avon, but he put the glass to his lips. They drank, watching each other, put their drinks down, looking away.

"Almost?" said Deva.

Avon smiled. "Oh," he said, "it all looks very pretty, but our friend Commissioner Sleer has a ... talent for letting other people take the fall. Even if the other person is herself."

"Yes," said Avon, and relapsed into silence.

"Because of Orac's little display? You shouldn't believe everything you see, Deva."

"It's an impressive trick."

"Yes. And that is all it is. Orac is ... useful, but it is not infallible. And it has a talent for misleading."

"I'm starting to realize that," said Deva. "I remember the shift I wasted - he let me waste - on the DNA records from Sleer's time at the CEC."

Deva drank his whisky, the taste of it reminding him of how much he missed Blake.

There was something missing in Blake, too; there always had been, since Deva had first met him.

Deva thought what was missing was whatever he'd lost in the explosion on Earth, the thing that his scar commemorated. Whatever that was: the closest Deva could get to it was something like belief. But he was afraid that Blake thought what was missing was Avon. _Why, Avon, I was waiting for you, of course..._ Of course.   
He didn't want to wonder what it must have been like when they were in bed. Something overwhelming. Something... unsurvivable.

Avon was saying something.

"... Sorry? Avon?"

"I said," said Avon politely, "that you never had time to explain to me how Pree's comm station worked."

Deva laughed and felt the morbid thoughts dissolve in the laughter. "It wasn't that I didn't have time. I don't know how it works. No-one understands Pree's creations - even she doesn't, she says. She grew up on Colnaghi."

"The abandoned mining colony in Sector One."

"Yes. She was a scavenger. That's how she thinks about tech. No formal education, but she can make almost anything do almost anything."

"It disturbs me," said Avon.

Deva carefully didn't look at him, refilling their glasses to cover it. "It's not - methodical," he said, agreeing.

"No, it isn't. And - it is difficult to be sure _what_ something is doing when you cannot be sure _how_ it is doing it."

"Oh, yes." They caught each other's eye again, and something passed between them: the feel of the last few weeks, the work, the checks and cross-checks, the laborious slowness of it. The opposite of Pree's wild, chaotic manifestations of trailing wires and loose ends. The need they both had to be careful, to be sure.

"You should see - " Deva began, but Fenn's voice interrupted him.  
" _There_ you are." He looked at them curiously from the door. "I was beginning to think you'd forgotten where this room was. What's the occasion?"

"We've made a breakthrough," said Deva.

"Oh, great. Some good news. Tell Tyce, will you, she's on a downer." Fenn turned away, walked a couple of paces quickly away from the door, then turned back.

"Aren't you coming?"

"Where?" said Deva patiently.

"What? Oh, I didn't say, did I? Too surprised to see the computer boys out from behind the desks. We've just had a message from our favourite career outlaw and we need to talk about it. Come on."

"Blake," said Deva, getting up, half-seeing Avon stand halfway up in a single movement like a twitch. He was at the door before he realized Avon wasn't with them, and he looked back.

"Avon?"

"You and Fenn are better qualified than I to judge how to use your resources. I'll go back to Orac and begin running those checks."

*

But he didn't go straightaway, listening to Deva's pattering feet fading down the corridor and feeling the grip of something he hadn't felt since Terminal: something entirely irrational.

Blake would be all right, he told himself (there's no-one as safe as a dead man). His priority had to be his own survival - the survival of everyone outside the Federation - and that depended on stopping the pacification programme; stopping Sleer.

But he couldn't shake a bad feeling, and the echo of an irrational - or at least irrelevant - Auron proverb: _In betraying what we love, we betray what is truest in ourselves_.

NINE

Pree turned back from the drinks cabinet with two glasses in her hand. Soolin was sitting, upright and relaxed simultaneously, right on the edge of the bed: she probably wasn't even aware that she was shifting her position very slightly as Pree moved, keeping Pree in her line of sight, keeping an open path between herself and the door. It would have been an exaggeration to say that her empty gun hand was twitching. Pree put a glass into it, and sat down herself on the chair.

"Nice quarters," said Soolin.

"Cheers. There's not supposed to be a base hierarchy - or, you know, not with privileges - but we just happened to be the first ones here, Tyce and Fenn and me. So - big rooms for the Big Three." Pree grinned wickedly, looking like a teenager for a second. "And I just can't face the common room tonight."

"Hmmm. Thanks for the drink. It's been a long day."

"One of the longest. Fuck, I'm tired."

"Mmm," said Soolin, somehow making the non-word sound heartfelt.

""Fucking typical Blake. Why can't he just shut up till he gets the drugs, then alienate three planetary governments? I don't think he's happy till he's on a Wanted poster, you know. I'm surprised that bounty-hunter thing lasted as long as it did."

"He still got the botanical material though. In fact, he still got the alliance: it just wasn't the one we were expecting."

Pree rolled her eyes. "No, it wasn't. It wasn't the one we could negotiate and trade with openly, it was the one that's going to be eating up all the resources on three separate bases for the next hundred years and open up yet another bloody front and lose us probably ten more ships which we don't even have, not counting the _Atwood_ , which we couldn't afford to lose."

"Blake's all right, though. And Hask."

"So far. If this fucking resistance can organize its way out of an easy-exit hatch and get him onto that ship. If they have a ship. If it flies."

"They've made it out of Sector Eight. That was the tricky bit, surely."

"Oh, yes, of course they have. Blake's - well, he's like that. I don't know quite what he does, but it always works. Trust me."

Soolin looked at her consideringly for a moment. "I wouldn't have had you down as a true believer in the Blake myth, somehow."

"Oh, I'm not. Nor is he," she added. "He's seen what it does."

"What do you mean?" asked Soolin quickly.

"Ach. Well, it's not really this group of cells that believe in the Blake myth. You know, we've _met_ him. It's the little kids on border worlds - stories get out, you know, crap. So they mine Federation bases, research stations, stuff like that, and blow themselves up. If they even get that far. I mean, we don't have Orac but we don't usually do too bad a job at monitoring Federation traffic, and the shit that goes on you wouldn't believe. No, you would, sorry. Teenagers executed for graffiti - you know, Blake Lives! - whatever. Those fuckers," she added evenly.

"I'll drink to that," said Soolin.

Pree smiled at her, a little distantly. "Oh, he can't do miracles, and fuck knows I can't work with the man - I was scheduled to be on the Gauda base originally, but two tempers that size in close quarters gets a little dangerous. And we could get along without him.

"I just hope we don't have to."

TEN

Avon woke up in the night from a dream that Blake was alive and the two of them were on Egrorian's shuttle. He opened his eyes on the darkness for a moment or two, then sat up, turned on the light, got out of the bed and the warmth and went to his desk. He watched the darkness of the screen for a moment or two as his terminal warmed up, and then began to load some of the files he had culled that day.

He began working, flagging the slow, patient connections, each one making Servalan a little less dead, Sleer a little less safe. He worked until the dream of a living Blake had faded back into darkness and it was safe to go back to sleep.

ELEVEN

Deva half-woke up out of a dream that Blake was dead, reached over for Blake's warm, breathing body, couldn't find it, and woke up properly. Blake was safely stowed on a cargo ship out of Sector Eight. Not dead. As far as Deva knew.

He put the lights up and lay in the half-empty bed looking into the narrow, halflit room. Shadows and half-tones of quiet blue and grey. A melancholy room. He tried to close his eyes but they came back open. His mind was quiet and melancholy, full of the shadowy knowledge that Blake was dead. He knew from having the dream before he was going to be carrying that knowledge around with him all day, and it was going to be a bad day. The odd thing was that the dream didn't always come when Blake was in real danger: but it was always worse when it did.

He sighed, swung himself out of bed, feeling the ache in his legs and his back, pulled on a jumper and trousers and padded barefooted down to the comms room.

Veron was on duty. She looked up when she heard him come in and the bluish light of the screen caught her face, bisecting it uncannily, for a second. She looked like an ancient image, the smooth skin down the left-hand side of her face reflecting near-white, the mass of scars on the other side deeply shadowed into blackness.

"Hello, Deva," she said, then looked back down at the screen. Deva sat down on a stool, with the terminals bench between them, rested his elbows on the bench and his chin on his hands, and waited for a good moment to talk to her. After a few minutes she paused in whatever she was doing and smiled her formal, pulled-down smile at him.

"Yes? What is it?"

"When's Blake due to check in?"

She checked the screen. "Not for another ten hours. We got the last message two hours ago, and he and Hask were fine."

"Will you play it for me?"

She glanced at him. "All right."

Deva closed his eyes against the dusty room and its pattern of shadows and listened to Blake's voice, whole and real, and felt the way his stomach recognised it before his ears did.

"Blake. Code green. Due to report again in twelve. And don't worry about us."

Deva thought about dead stars burning and the speed of light. Messages from the dead. Codes. He opened his eyes.

"Get yourself some tea," said Veron. "I might as well have a break."

*

How many times had he been here, Deva wondered: drinking tea and talking about Blake in the quiet of a comms room, terminals humming to themselves, the eerie small-hours light from the screens, dust particles floating calmly. The roof here was much higher than the Gauda comms room, the hum a slightly different note, but it was the same. And always, always, talking about Blake. It must get tedious for Veron: it did for him. It was hard to tell, though: Veron's attention, like Blake's, could be turned almost overwhelmingly to the subject at hand, but she had less of a temper than Blake and far more patience and calm. As if her lack of facial expression had turned inwards: as if the mask had become her face. And there was always a sense that she was holding half of herself in reserve, in shadow, where Blake found it hard to gamble less than everything. They made a good team, Blake and Veron: they always had, since the beginning, on Earth, when it had just been the three of them.

Veron was the only one who had known him since the beginning - the beginning of his outlawry, of his freedom, of the terrifying conjunction of his desires and his beliefs in a single body: Blake's. There was no turning away from Blake. It was loving men that had started his career as a subversive - until he didn't know, when he woke in guilt and fear, whether it was from a dream of faceless hard bodies or from a dream of setting charges and waiting for the fire to start - and it was loving Blake that would end it.

And so, always this: sitting talking about Blake in rooms haunted by his voice, surrounded by a network of computers like a magic circle to protect Blake, to make him appear, to make him speak, to keep him whole. To conjure him, Deva realized, as if he wasn't real. He thought of the impossible photograph and wondered whether, if it had been him on Terminal, he would have been able to tell: and whether the Blake Sleer would have made for him would have been recognizable to Avon. Or to Blake, come to that. And wondered who this man was he had loved for four years, in the closest proximity and, it seemed, from the furthest of distances.

Deva and Veron sat facing each other across the tangles of wire on the bench. Steam rose from their mugs and mingled between them.


	5. Part Four

PART FOUR

ONE

Deva was sitting on the floor of the landing bay anteroom, his hands wrapped round a mug of cold tea as if for warmth. Tarrant and Veron were in the comms room, talking Blake and Hask through the landing. Avon was standing on his own in a corner of the anteroom, looking absent. Dayna and Soolin were in a little, fidgety, gossippy knot near the door (and edging nearer) with the Big Three plus Lorida and Raq, who were standing by with a frankly scary-looking trolley which flashed its lights intermittently for no good reason Deva could work out - and Deva had been watching it for a couple of hours now, trying to keep his mind off the incomprehensible words feeding through the PA ( _Blake, run fuel and primary nav checks again... Hask, deb at 43-09-22, adjust..._ )

He jumped a little when he heard Vila's voice untechnologically beside him.

"Sorry," said Vila. "Is this bit of floor taken, or can anyone sit here?"

Deva smiled, or tightened his mouth upwards and hoped it would do. "Please." He sat down, or rather they sat down: Jenna was with him.

"Jenna," Deva said uneasily, "are you allowed to..."

Her smile was more successful than his had been. "Fenn says I'm allowed all over the base now, as long as I never, ever, touch any of the communications devices. I'm not allowed to," she added importantly, and Deva winced. It was strange how much of Jenna's charm had come from her anger and her ability to lie, as if her particular strength had come from the electric friction between her style and her substance. There had been an edgy feeling around her, missing now.

Vila reached over and ruffled Jenna's hair: she frowned and pulled away, and he took his hand back. Behind a slightly overdone hangdog look, he looked delighted at her small disapproval. "It's just for a while, Jenna, till Lorida and Raq and Blake's new friends come up with the right drugs for you and you stop being so spineless."

"I like that, coming from you," said Jenna almost indignantly. "You - "

+Fuck+: Blake's voice over the PA, and Dayna's nervous half-giggle in the room, trailing into silence.

Veron's voice: +Language+; Tarrant's, +Hask, is it too late to get back up into orbit?+; Hask's: +Yes. Landing or nothing.+

+All right. Kill all power on engines 7 and 4.+

The room was silent and tense.

+Take it as slow as you can, the hull won't take much more.+

Deva looked at the patterns of scum on the surface of his tea and wished for a cigarette.

+Listing to 01-03-00. Correct... Check+.

+God! Slower, Hask, slower! Blake, nav checks.+

Blake: +No time.+ Hask: +No need. The primary retros have failed.+

And then a voice in the room again, distorted not by technology but by something else. Deva looked over at Avon.

"Tarrant. Use Orac. If it can sabotage a ship, it can save one," and then, under his breath, "Redemption."

Silence. Beside Deva, Jenna leant back against the wall and looked with interest at her nails. On the other side of the room, Avon was still and tense. Between them were all the shades in between.

Hask's voice at last: +Retros back on line.+

TWO

"God, but I'm tired," said Blake, smiling at Deva over Fenn's shoulder (he was being quite thoroughly hugged).

" _You're_ tired? Who was piloting?" said Hask, who was hugging Pree, Tyce and Raq all at once. "I'm going to rename that bloody ship the _Piece of Shit_. God, but I thought we were dead for sure."

Deva moved towards Blake, but there were too many people in between. "Wait your turn, Deva," said Tyce over her shoulder. "We all want a bit of Blake now."

So Deva leant against the wall and watched Blake giving a bit of Blake to everyone who had been waiting for it. And watched Avon turn and leave the room. And watched something happen to Blake's face when he saw Avon was missing.


	6. Epilogue

EPILOGUE

"Servalan is dead," said Sleer. They were watching it happen in real time on the screen. Orac estimated the time lag at around half a standard hour.

There were just the three of them - Blake, Deva and Avon - in the meetings room, watching their remote-control machinations play themselves out in real time on the screen.

There was a semicircle of black-uniformed, black-masked troopers around Sleer's desk, their guns raised and pointing at her: ten invisible lines keeping her fixed where she stood, her fingers spread and balanced along the edge of the desk, as still as a photograph. The leaves on a plant waved slightly in the air-conditioned breeze: the air-conditioning breathed quietly under the soundtrack.

"Servalan is dead," said Sleer. "She cannot be put on trial, and it is grotesque to suggest that I should be tried for her crimes. At least, unless President Rontane has rewritten the judicial code quite substantially in the last year."

In the centre of the semicircle, facing her directly, was a Space Commander: no helmet, the latest Space Command officer-class logo on his chest.

"Do you understand the nature and the gravity of the charges named against you?"

Deva was sitting between Blake and Avon at the long table. There was deep, dead silence in the room, as if each of them were alone with the videocast.

"Named against a dead woman. This is a farce."

"Named against you, Commissioner. Please answer the question."

"I understand. But I insist it be put on record that I deny these charges can be legally brought against me."

"Thank you. It is so noted. Now please come with us."

Sleer's face: rigid, proud, all eyes for a second. She dropped her eyelashes, straightened her back, and moved a little stiffly as she came out from behind the desk to walk between two troopers out of the room.

Fade to black.

Deva felt himself let his breath out, felt Blake and Avon on either side breathing in unison with him.

+Sleer's presence is confirmed on the Federation high-security transport Nairobi,+ said Orac. +It will take me roughly thirty standard minutes to establish a real-time link with the _Nairobi_ cameras. Playback will commence then.+

Avon leaned forward in silence to touch _rewind_ on the screen controls, then _play_.

"Servalan is dead," said Sleer, and Blake turned to look at Avon as he shifted, breaking the silence in the room. Deva watched Blake's eyes on Avon, Avon's eyes on the screen.

"Servalan is dead," said Servalan, and Avon shook his head, smiling quietly.

"No," he said under his breath. "She isn't".

And Deva watched him meet Blake's eyes.

END


End file.
